Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Andrew Garrod, professor of education emeritus and former chair of the Department of Education, died on Jan. 28.

“Andrew Garrod was an extraordinary educator and humanitarian who embodied the very best of liberal arts education—a scholar deeply committed to teaching, a mentor who helped students discover their own voices, and a visionary who understood that education extends far beyond the classroom,” John Carey, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said in a community message. “His legacy will continue to inspire us all.”

Garrod’s career spanned multiple continents and disciplines. After serving during National Service as a lieutenant with the Royal Marines in Cyprus from 1956 to 1958, he earned a BA and MA in English literature and language from Oxford University, then pursued graduate work at Harvard University, where he completed his Ed.M. in 1976 and Ed.D. in 1982.

Before coming to Dartmouth, Garrod taught English in Saint John, New Brunswick, public schools for 16 years, serving as head of the English department from 1972 to 1978. His student productions of Shakespeare brought wide acclaim to Saint John High School, prompting alumni to establish a scholarship in his name at the University of New Brunswick. In 1974, he won the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Award for Theatre Direction for his production of Romeo and Juliet at the Dominion Drama Festival, Canada’s national amateur drama festival.

Garrod came to Dartmouth in 1985 as a seasoned educator with 17 years of public high school teaching experience and professorships at two Canadian universities. He taught at Dartmouth for 25 years, serving as chair of the Department of Education and longtime director of the Teacher Education Program. His research focused on the moral and identity development of adolescents, with particular attention to cross-cultural applications of developmental theory and the use of personal narrative as a tool for exploration.

A prolific editor, Garrod produced a series of volumes that amplified the voices of Dartmouth students from diverse backgrounds. His anthologies, most of which were co-edited with fellow scholars, include First Person, First Peoples: Native American College Graduates Tell Their Life Stories (1997), Souls Looking Back: Life Stories of Growing Up Black (1999), and Adolescent Portraits: Identity, Relationships, and Challenges (1992), which sold over 35,000 copies across four editions and was used in more than 100 colleges nationwide. Later volumes focused on Asian American, Latino, multi-racial, Muslim, and Native American students, becoming essential reading for understanding the pluralistic identity of the modern American campus.

For Garrod, the writing process itself was profoundly educational. Working outside of class and without academic credit, student writers were mentored by Garrod through more than a year of focused work on their essays. Speaking on the occasion of his retirement in 2010, education professor Donna Coch said: “His ability to build trusting relationships with students, his willingness to listen to the stories of his students and represent them to a wider world, and his support of his students’ identity development are exceptional.”

Reflecting on this work, Garrod wrote: “I regard as one of my major scholarly contributions the work I have done on student autobiographical narratives… I have been particularly interested in how adolescents from various minority groups have experienced their education. Their narratives have permitted me—as well as students and other researchers—to know what could not have been known through a more abstract medium, to come to understand the phenomenology of the individual’s experience.”

Garrod’s signature course, Education 20, changed the lives of countless students, many of whom expressed their gratitude to him in writing in recent years. For some, it was a single class that set the trajectory of their careers. One former student, now a lawyer with over 30 years of experience in discrimination and harassment law, recalled the course as “the start of my evolution into a college student who studied the civil rights and labor movements, a law student who studied about discrimination and labor law.”

For others, the course shattered preconceptions and opened new ways of seeing the world. One student described how the first-year course “broke my worldview open,” exposing the causes, consequences, and breadth of inequality in America. “Taking Ed 20 was like dumping a bucket of ice water on my head,” the student wrote.

The impact came as much from Garrod’s teaching methods as from the material itself. In one famous assignment, students were asked to describe their high schools using few if any adjectives, as though they were “alien to the world, dropped into an American high school for the first time.” The exercise taught students to strip away judgment and focus on structural facts, a lesson that resonated for decades. 

That same former student, now a professor teaching labor history, reflected: “Now, in my own labor history courses, when I teach my students to strip their essays of ‘isms,’ to demonstrate how differential experience has been baked into law, economy, and policy, I think of Andrew’s lesson and about the power of argumentation through basic structural facts.”

Perhaps Garrod’s greatest gift was making students feel seen. “Above all, Andrew’s impact was to make me feel deeply seen, my experiences meaningful and instructive," one former student wrote. “I hear that same thread echoed in the stories of so many of his former students. That feeling of being seen is powerful, it bolsters and fortifies you. And it makes you want to reflect it back to others, like a mirror turned on its axis.”

His excellence in teaching was widely recognized. He received the Student Assembly’s Undergraduate Teaching Initiative: Profiles in Excellence Award twice during his tenure—one of only three faculty members to have won this award more than once. He also received Dartmouth’s Distinguished Teaching Award and was selected by students to be the Class Day speaker at Dartmouth’s Commencement Week exercises in both 1993 and 1998. He supervised eight students as Presidential Scholars and was the primary advisor to two successful Caribbean Rhodes Scholarship applicants.

As department chair from 1996 to 2001, Garrod earned the department an admirable review from the New Hampshire State Department of Education for its Teacher Education Program. He established partnerships with area schools, instituted mentored teaching internships in Majuro, Marshall Islands, and co-founded the Summer Enrichment at Dartmouth program, which brought high school sophomores from inner-city Philadelphia, Boston, and rural New Hampshire to campus for intensive instruction.

“Andrew was a tireless advocate for the Education Department, consistently arguing that the study of human development was central to the liberal arts mission,” said associate professor Michele Tine, chair of the Education Steering Committee. 

A firm believer in the power of the arts to foster social and emotional growth, Garrod co-founded Youth Bridge Global in 2004 while still a full-time faculty member. The organization used theater to bridge cultural divides and provide educational opportunities to under-resourced regions of the world. He directed high-quality Shakespearean productions in post-conflict and developing areas, including Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda, bringing together youth from divided ethnic or social backgrounds to collaborate on complex texts.

With support from Dartmouth alumni, Youth Bridge Global mounted productions of Romeo and Juliet in Kigali, Rwanda, with students of Hutu and Tutsi heritage, and Much Ado About Nothing in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with Muslim, Serb, and Catholic Croat youth. These productions were the subject of two widely acclaimed documentaries. At Dartmouth, Garrod integrated these international experiences into his courses, often taking students to the Marshall Islands or the Balkans to witness firsthand how identity is negotiated in the wake of trauma or geographic isolation.

In 2002, Garrod hosted an 18-member group of multiethnic Bosnian teenagers and their teachers at Dartmouth for a three-week program on leadership and civic development, funded by a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of State.

In 2017, Garrod received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of New Brunswick and delivered the commencement address.

Though he retired from Dartmouth in 2010, Garrod maintained a strong connection to campus, recruiting Dartmouth students to work on Youth Bridge Global theater productions and continuing to mentor young scholars and artists.

“His colleagues remember him as a man of boundless energy, intellectual curiosity, and a deep, empathetic commitment to the youth of the world,” Tine said. “He received numerous accolades throughout his career, yet those who knew him best recall that his greatest pride was always the success of and relationships with his students.”

Jay Davis ’90, director of the First-Generation Office and assistant dean of undergraduate students, considered Garrod a profound influence and mentor. Davis took two classes with Garrod, served as his research assistant, co-edited a book with him, pursued two research projects together in Bosnia, directed the SEAD program that Garrod co-founded, and taught alongside him as a colleague in the education department for 11 years.

“Andrew had changed the direction of my life by the second week of his Education 20 class,” Davis said. “He exposed me to the profound educational inequities in our society, fiercely challenged me to fight these inequities, and gently and compassionately helped me find my way of doing so. He had an uncanny understanding of his students on three continents, and he could see their best selves when they couldn’t see it themselves. Professor Garrod had very high standards and very deep wells of empathy, and thousands of his students have gone on to use his inspiration to make the world a better place.”

In his own words, written in 2001, Garrod described his approach to teaching and his legacy at Dartmouth: “I attribute the success I have had in the college classroom to my deep understanding of adolescents—their intellectual abilities, ways of knowing, and emotional needs.”

He continued: “I take considerable pride in the regard that students hold for me as a teacher; I take far greater joy in touching their lives through alerting them to a deeper understanding of educational issues, of the processes of human development, and of themselves.”

Garrod is survived by his four nieces, Felicity Callard, Vanessa Callard, Katie Garrod, and Fenella Ignatiev, and their families; and by multiple close friends, many of whom he at one point taught and or mentored, in countries across the world. He was predeceased by his three siblings: Maidie Garrod, Jan Callard, and Martin Garrod.

A memorial service will be held in the Upper Valley later this year, with details to be announced. His family requests that donations be made in Garrod’s name to the Upper Valley Humane Society.

The Dartmouth flag will be lowered in Garrod’s honor on Feb. 5 and 6.